


Everything That Dies

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brother Feels, Episode: s15e09 The Trap, Episode: s15e15 Gimme Shelter, New Jersey, Road Trips, Season/Series 15, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:54:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27222289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: Darkness doesn't take holidays, but Winchesters do. Sort of.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Everything That Dies

Pennsylvania is full of ghosts, like every other state, and divided equally between light and shadow. Dean drives like a mission of old. Sam breathes and looks out the window at what might, at some other time, be green. 

It's been too long, too long without grease on the seats and what used to be rock on the radio, the two of them rolling towards what might once have been destiny, not really knowing what that meant, not really knowing anything at all.

*****

Crap, Dean says, and means--

everything, _everything_ is happening slow, from bumper-to-bumper to this ending of theirs, more drawn out than any of their others. South of Johnstown, Sam thought of floods.

Now fire. A catalogue of hellholes.

You know, Sam says, they might get new antibiotics out of that mine fire under Centralia. Throws _thermophilic_ at Dean so his brother can call him a geek, look up quick from the endless road.

What are we gonna need those for anyway, Dean says, and Sam makes the face and takes a sip, last of the good hydration. 

I-70 shoots south, mocks, dares them not to. 

I'm not--Dean says, and he means putting up with more slowdown, more between them and the Jersey shore. Glittery railbird named Amara. 

*****

Sam thinks about fire again when they find her, or she finds them, witch-quick and too big for her body. Thinner, woman-form. Crackling next to the pumps off exit 85. 

Sam sees his brother remember with his gut, could be a lot of things but maybe that sickness he got, told Sam about, when the angels scorch-smote the earth around him and the Darkness. 

Amara says, really, Dean, you think I wouldn't--cocked head, big eyes; too-bright, Disney-color aura-- _smell you?_

Nothing makes sense anymore, least that they know god's sister at all.

Sam doesn't want to sit in a deli with her, but he does; doesn't want to let his brother talk to her alone, but he does.

While Dean's finishing whatever business he still has, Sam thinks--

Cosmic entities used to have gravitas. Now they're cartoons, in a script penned by the same.

_After all these years, is this how we go out._

*****

Dean's shoulders are bluff-level, but he's stroking the wheel with his thumb. A tell. 

It's not a hamster wheel, Sam thinks, it's just a story, their story, maybe not a gospel but a graphic novel. Big-eyed manga even as long as it's not, well, Dean's favorite kind. 

Maybe we go small, Sam says. He writes in his journals every night now, notes for the end of the world, but they aren't cosmic; they aren't even in dead languages, just the plain Kansas English of his youth. 

Small, Dean says.

Less epic, says Sam, maybe we-- 

Dean’s pissed, whatever he learned from Amara. He's banging the wheel now, invoking their mother, talking about not liking _death_ with his road food. He wants to drive, and hit something--maybe the coast.

Whaddya say, Sammy, Dean says, whaddya say. I know--

He means: I know casinos aren't your favorite thing, now less than ever. It's not like Dean's forgotten; Sam zip-tied to a chair on God's gaming floor, godhole wide open and shut.

There's a little bit of Sam that wants Eileen, wants her right here next to him the way he wants his brother, another that knows: that story is gone now. That story was written for someone else. 

Traffic has cleared, the way south and east humming, Waze wide open.

Atlantic City it is, he says, just so he can see Dean grin, briefly, and settle.

*****

Tourist buses have fallen off, but not completely, Dean points out.

This seaside is a boomtown gone bust, all post-hurricane and crash, last vestige of an old idea of a good time. Plus some hipster bars, food trucks, beer gardens; not really what Amara was after. Still that want, though, of all seasides. Land’s end isn’t a thing they knew as kids, not really.

Eat? Dean asks. Not like they didn’t snack, or like he didn’t stop, special, to pick up a mini-mart concept of a green drink for Sam.

Chill in the air. Off-season.

Sure, Sam says, because boardwalks are taffy and fried dough, sugar spun fine after skee ball…and Jersey is, Dean says, the place where they ganked Paris and ate turducken stuffed with slime; real Americana-type stuff, that you could laugh at if it wasn’t the end times.

Pine Barrens, Sam thinks, Bobby and Bambi and fake monsters and real ones; further up the pike the glitter of bridges, the shadow of New York; suburbs full of gardens the state is named for; pretty gates and hills and horse farms.

They walk. It’s too cold for redemption games, or it would be, if Sam didn’t laugh out loud just thinking of the metaphoric potential.

Sam? Dean asks. Not really worried.

More like: I want you to be having a good time, or it’s on me.

Dunes and the jetty, clouds in the shining wave of the Ocean Casino, where the boardwalk used to end.

*****

Sam, in the men’s at the Ocean, in the mirror, wonders at how they’ve both worn, for years, the perma-tan of hunters and the underground pallor of men of letters. Lands on Dad in his features and chokes a little, thinking how John’d like playing grandfather to the devil’s kid. To _Jack._ The son he never thought he’d have.

Because how is that so different from being a dad to Sam himself, is what he’s said to his brother. We aren’t our blood, or our many bloods, at least not only those.

We’re what we write on the wall in it.

Dean sticks his head in, pointedly doesn’t say, you look perfect, Princess, or anything at all about Sam’s hair.

You alright?

Yeah, Sam says.

*****

They play slots for awhile. Double Diamond, Little Shop of Horrors, (Sam refuses Day of the Dead). Dean’s kid-happy, cracking wise. A few other people (dude in an Asbury Park hoodie; woman in oddly dressy peach pantsuit) drift through, sit and play and clink drinks. Casino quietude; tacky-shiny underwater flash.

Sam scans for threats, but there are no deities here. It’s like they walk off the stage, sometimes, wherever humans throw on the feather boas, fix on the faded dreams.

Dean dumps some tickets in his hands, says something about cherries and checking in with Cas.

Sam thinks of bodies stacked and tilted like dominoes—his and Dean’s at the beginning and the end, everyone they’ve lost in the middle, Winchester alpha-omega collapsing itself on a fresh-felted table.

What’s eating you now? Dean says.

Sam tries to brush it off, but Dean quits feeding Birds of Pay and twists around:

Uh-uh, Sammy. That’s not your fun face.

Dean’s ability to compartmentalize has always been far superior. Sam admires him for it; always has.

Just—Sam says. Ferris outside, sitting in the gray.

Dean wraps things up and pulls on his coat and waits for Sam and his coat and they go together out into the wind. Dune grass; deep smell of diesel and sea.

It’ll be dark soon. Colors coming on.

I lost hope there for awhile, Sam says, you know that.

Yeah, and I’ve been angry this whole time, Dean says, that’s never changed.

It’s just, Sam says, I don’t like it, Dean, the scale of this thing.

Scale, Dean say, it’s not like we choose that part. We never have.

Sam’s tried to explain, not just that his god-wound was access, like a port, not like a wheel you spin, or an adventure you choose, but all the stories at once, spinning out milky and bright like galaxies, beauty and terror different than they'd ever known, if that meant anything at all. 

He can try again, tell Dean they can walk off the board, or the page, or well, out of the casino, or the laundromat, with Baby's broken window and the wings of a crow. All these years, and nothing has changed.

Yeah, we were a freaking gospel, Dean says. That was when Chuck was Chuck, prophet and producer of pulp fiction. Or when God was a sadsack holed up in the bunker with a fifth and a short stack.

There’s a still a hole there, Sam wants to say, like his body's always been, in some way or another, shot clean through on its astral plane. That way is closed, but only if you think that wounds really close, that god or angels can ever really heal them.

We don't play, Sam says instead. He means: not any sort of game heaven or earth can devise, not Gabriel’s genre roulette, the dimensional chess of apocalypse, not these small-time table games, not poker with 900-year-old witches, not the hustle-pool of their youth or Alaska, not Monopoly or Boggle or freaking Battleship.

Forget about Billie and her books, Purgatory flowers and spells for the dead.

We write our own script, Sam says, or we each write our own and meet in the middle. 

This a ‘you-never-needed-the-feather' moment, Sammy? Dean asks, and to his credit it doesn’t make Sam think of Ruby.

Last time, Dean was a soul bomb. Now Rowena's in hell and they make their own magic, their own luck. Maybe they can’t lose. Maybe this isn’t one of Chuck’s worlds at all but their own, energy thrumming between like they’d taken on engines.

_Once upon a time, Death said he would reap God._

There’s Baby, parked safe; a ride for all times, the whole country bent to her rims.

*****

After Sandy, there was a rumor that the boardwalks were gone, swept away in the storm surge. They weren’t.

The boardwalk is wide open this time of year. The beaches rolled up white-gray and Atlantic, yearning. Sea dark-blue as your eyes, whoever you are. 

That's it, Sam has a vision, or something like. Broken open like the very edge of the continent. Maybe Dean can see it too.

Snow, swirled down the gray boards like it could white out the world. Snow and ocean cold off the flats. 

They watch it erasing planks, watch it like they could take their hands and sweep clean, like scribes of god, whatever's been written for them. They have before. 

Dean says they can't, they can only write to the point that the road runs out, because Chuck's rubbed out the rest of the world.

Maybe they erase it all first, ride off into the dawn of a godless day.

Why can’t we, Sam says, smiles at his brother because neither of them is on the altar; neither of them is a martyr. Just candles, flickering. Small men caught between darkness and day.

We write our own, meet in the middle, Sam says, leave god and his sister to sort it out themselves, like last time. Re-join, he could say, become one again.

Un-bang the Big Bang? Dean says, what’s that gonna do?

We can't, Dean says, Sam right there next to him in the chill wind and the end of America. He means: Screw god and his sister too, because even things that don’t bleed can die.

Maybe they can.

**Author's Note:**

> [Meet me tonight, in Atlantic City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3eu1gW-bQ8&ab_channel=BruceSpringsteenVEVO)
> 
> Once a Jersey girl, always a Jersey girl.


End file.
